Friedrich Hayek’s 1944 book, The Road to Serfdom, warned of the dangers to a free society from central planning. Efforts by the rich country clubs of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and European Union (EU) to impose new international tax rules through a variety...

This empirical study stresses the underlying macroeconomic forces which determine foreign trade flows in CPEs. The general specification includes a planners' demand equation for the volume of imports, a planners' supply equation for the volume of exports, and a rest-of-world demand equation for...

We analyze consequences of changing the terms of trade between agriculture and industry on capital accumulation and on welfare of workers in different sectors. The issue was central to Soviet industrialization debate and it remains important in today's developing world. Through a simple general...

The paper serves as an introduction to the RuJE special issue on the circulation of economic ideas between Russia and the West. This circulation is a contentious issue, especially among Russian economists. In this article a specific pattern of West-Russia-West transfer is investigated. The...

The paper considers issues in recent research on macroeconomic equilibrium in centrally planned economies. I defend the explicit aggregative , macroeconomic approach in theory, institutional relationships and measurement. It has offered a fresh, coherent framework for analysis of many CPE...

Under communism, workers had their wages set according to a centrally-determined wage grid. In this paper we use new micro data on men to estimate returns to human capital under the communist wage grid and during the transition to a market economy. We use data from the Czech Republic because it...

Conventional wisdom suggests that the stocks of human capital were one of the few positive legacies from communism. However, if factories under communism were so inefficient, why would the education system not have been? Using the education production function approach and new data on...

Since the economic calculation debate of the 1920-30s, it is known that it is impossible to create a coherent balanced plan that equates supply and demand of millions of goods and services in the national economy, not to speak about the optimal plan. It is not well understood, though, how the...

Most of the time the budget constraints in the socialist economies were harder than in developing countries and no less hard than in developed countries. The soft budget constraints (SBC) in socialist economies were not pervasive, as most authors believe, but selective, i.e. involved...

Chapter 1: Perceptions -- Chapter 2: Making Decisions: Lessons from Behavioural Economics -- Chapter 3: Establishing the Socialist Workplace: Labour, Norms and the Introduction of Piecework -- Chapter 4: Learning from the Soviet Union Means Learning to Win: Group Technology and the Mitrofanov...

"This volume examines failed attempts at modernizing the communist economy by means of optimal planning. It traces the rise and fall of the concept in Eastern Europe and China, explaining why the mission of optimization was doomed to fail and why it may nevertheless be relaunched today."

The socialism-to-market transition is over but has left its marks on the transitioning economies. An important lesson of transition is the major effect of the hardness of the budget constraint on the process, the resulting economy, and the state. One should not overlook its ethical import: a...

"Wer nicht mit uns geht, sondern mit den reaktionären Kräften, wird in unserer Zone rücksichtslos liquidiert und vernichtet ...", so der SED-Chef von Leipzig, Lohagen, am 9. Oktober 1947. Die Devise der Stalinisten der ersten Stunde war deutlich. In der Folge verschwanden viele erfolgreiche...

"Communist agriculture – from the perspective of the pig. In Communist Pigs, Thomas Fleischman traces the rise and fall of the German Democratic Republic from the perspective of one animal, Sus scrofa, or the pig. His goal is to offer a deeper understanding of the development of industrial...

The failure of economic central planning in the Soviet Union is interpreted as evidence of the impossibility of efficient central planning. But the deficiencies of the Soviet economy might have resulted from other factors, such as Soviet history, culture, leadership, and/or unique circumstances,...

Cover; Half Title; Series Page; Title; Copyright; Contents; Figures and diagrams; Tables; Boxes; Acknowledgements; Introduction; 1 Formal and informal institutions of the socialist era; 1.1 Political system and development; 1.1.1 The Communist Party of Czechoslovakia; 1.2 Legal and enforcing system;...

Administrative department as a mechanism of resource allocation -- The evaluation criteria for efficiency and fairness on resource allocation led by the administrative departments -- Applying rent seeking theory to analyze resource allocation by the administrative departments -- The efficiency...